This is not the first time that a growing world population, a rise in energy costs, increased demand for meat, and failed harvests have resulted in a food crisis, reports The Christian Science Monitor.

Those same conditions also applied in the 1970s, when failed grain harvests in the Soviet Union set off price reactions around the globe. And the Great Depression in the 1930s was the longest-lasting food crisis of the past century.

Experts say that two new factors are contributing to the current problem: the use of crops to produce biofuels and the new prosperity of China and India, the world’s most populated countries.

“We have probably close to 4 billion people wanting to move up the food chain, consuming more meat, milk, and maize—and that takes a lot of grain,” says Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, who also blames the diversion of corn to ethanol distilleries.

The crises in the 1930s and the 1970s generated new thinking on how to avert global hunger.

Abdolreza Abbassian, secretary of intergovernmental group on grains for the UN’s FAO, says that today’s crisis should spur more research into genetically modified food. “One of the lessons is to look at research in food technology and whether this has room to improve. People have to look at agriculture from scratch. Research has been neglected for so long.”

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute says that the effects of the current crisis are farther-reaching than that of the 1970s. Then, famine mainly occured in African Sahel and Bangladesh, while the hunger crisis today is hitting low-income people around the world.

“Clearly there is a big problem. Prices have gone up enormously and this is having a dramatic effect on some groups of people in some countries,” UN task force coordinator John Holmes said, citing the nation of Afghanistan, people cannot afford many basic foods.

Genetically modified crops are being touted as a way to avert food crises in the future, but some question their effectiveness. A recent study that found that the yield from genetically modified soya was 10 percent smaller than the yield from plants that were not genetically engineered.